Enjoy our new “interviews over beer” series… aka Interbrews™.
This episode we’re talking with Uncommon Legal founder Jamie Maracario at St. Pete Brewing Co.
We talk about business, legal stuff, and beer. Educational AND fun!
Enjoy our new “interviews over beer” series… aka Interbrews™.
This episode we’re talking with Organic Beard Supply founder Tyler Goelz at Green Bench Brewing Co.
We talk about business, beards, and beer. How fun is that?
Marketing has changed. Today’s consumers are online most of their day. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, SnapChat, Instagram, Pinterest – are all in the palm of your hand. Literally, on your smart phone.
These social media channels are indeed that – social. Your customers want to get to know you, get to trust you and feel they have a relationship (although in an online way) with you before they are willing to spend money with you. 
Many service based professionals like injury attorneys or plumbers are pros you don’t really need until you REALLY need them.
If you’ve already established a relationship with potential customers BEFORE they need you, their journey down your sales funnel just got a lot easier for you both. After people get in a car accident is not the time to start building a relationship and getting them to hire you if you are an attorney – they’ll just do a blind search for the lowest cost. But if you’ve been working that relationship for months, they won’t hesitate to call the professional they feel they know.
Let me explain it in another way, Inbound Marketing is named that because you attract ideal clients TO you (inbound instead of outbound) and they come willingly for non-sales reasons such as:
After this engagement, when it comes time to move from follower to customer they come willingly. After all, you are now someone they feel they know.
Want to learn more? Contact me today and I’ll tell you more about it over coffee.
I’m a night owl. I tend to work more in the late hours when life has quieted down than in the morning when I’m growling and searching for coffee.
It’s late at night that I can pop on my headphones (thank God Dr. Dre made the big ones cool again) and get some writing done. There is a lot of writing in social media work. It’s the life blood – the content in the content driven marketing.
Blog articles can range from “hipster beer reviews” to “behavioral health information”, from “why this sandwich is the best ever” to “reasons you should opt for wood floors over carpet!” A split personality is a plus for such writers. And each blog will eventually need a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and perhaps an Instagram post crafted to drive traffic to it. And of course, each social media channel should be written differently (see prior post about my pet peeve here). So music can be a nice way to quiet all the unhelpful voices in your head.
Now this blog is much less serious. I’m going to talk about music. That GO-TO music that we all grab in our Spotify feeds when we need to relax, calm down and kick the work out. I’m sure my younger co-workers will groan at my choices but we all have our own comfort zone. There is no right or wrong answer, that’s the cool thing about music.
So at the risk of much eye rolling and teasing tomorrow, I’m going to share with you my feed tonight and you’ll quickly see the mood I’m in:
Leather and Lace – Stevie Nicks and Don Henley (this one is a sure fire choice to lower my blood pressure immediately – never fails)
Staying Alive – Bee Gees (listening to this right now) Don’t scoff, everyone had this album.
September – Earth Wind and Fire
My Sharona – The Knack
Do It Again – Steely Dan
Hot Stuff – Donna Summer
Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough – Michael Jackson
Mr. Blue Sky – Electric Light Orchestra
Brass in Pocket – Pretenders
Gypsy – Fleetwood Mac
Bloody Well Right – Supertramp
You Oughta Know – Alanis Morissette
Brick House – Commodores
Crazy on You – Heart
Edge of Seventeen – Stevie Nicks
Don’t Stop Me Now – Queen
Ok, let me hear it. What’s on YOUR work playlist tonight?
You’ve heard me talk about the use of hashtags and links on Facebook before, however why is it when we have hard stats and facts on results do we still see people, and paid professionals (and they are NOT cheap), continue to use tactics that we know hurt our marketing efforts?
My only conclusion is good ol’ fashioned peer pressure. When we see competitors or big agencies using bad tactics, we think “oh, well they must know what they are doing.” Not so. They are just following the crowd. Following them chasing popularity over profitability.
Let’s review again the facts.
Use all the made up, crazy hashtags you want on Instagram. They don’t hurt you. Use a ton if you feel the need. Now whether they help you or not is another question. Are people going to like what they see when they click on them? Is anyone following them? Are they used in your local area? #shoplocal #craftbeer #cityname #popularnetworkinggroup #bizneighborhoodgroup #yourpersonalhashtag are good.
Other things like #thisbeerissoawewsome or #doingitdoingit might be fun. But that’s all it is.
Do not repost your Instagram to Facebook. They are unique and need posts written for them. (Twitter too) Hashtags HURT your post. We know this as fact.
The below results from a study by Social Bakers, which examined how Facebook engagement correlates hashtag use.
Posts with 1 or 2 hashtags averaged 593 interactions
Posts with 3 to 5 hashtags averaged 416 interactions
Posts with 6 to 10 hashtags averaged 307 interactions
Posts with more than 10 hashtags averaged 188 interactions
SEE WHAT’S HAPPENING? YOU ARE LOSING PEOPLE.
If you don’t have a LINK back to your website at the bottom of your Facebook post, you are simply entertaining your Facebook followers and doing nothing to turn them into paying customers or attracting new paying customers. Your goal is to guide people down a sales funnel. This is business, not personal. Repeat – this is business, not personal.
The Education Curve is steep in social media and inbound marketing. It went from something we did for fun to the big boy in profitable marketing in a very short time. Most business owners do not know how it all works or what “great results” are. Unfortunately, a lot of agencies don’t know either and are selling a whole lot of nothing for a very high price!
Sadly, I see people continue to do this for their business even with this knowledge. Posting a pretty photo and 14 hashtags will not get you customers. So what do you want? Popularity or Profitability?
The holidays, the old saying goes, are the most wonderful time of year. And for many businesses, they’re also the busiest and most important.
1. Have a clear goal and decide what you want to achieve.
Before you do anything, you need to outline your goals and what it is you want to achieve with your campaign. This goes for any sort of advertising, and not just what you do at the holidays; otherwise, you just have a bunch of tactics that are trying to get attention but aren’t really tied to an overall strategy or goal. And without that goal in mind, you can’t have real success.
2. Create a content calendar and work backward from major dates.
Proper planning is going to make or break your campaign, so mark out key dates in advance and work backwards in order to figure out time lines and deadlines. Create a spreadsheet with a column for each day and then a row for each marketing channel. Even if it doesn’t have a lot of detail, it’ll give the team an overview at a glance. Then you can have specific dates highlighted in order make sure you hit all your deadlines.
3. Decide what to measure.
You should judge the success of your marketing efforts based on what you were trying to achieve. If your aim was to get more sales at a physical location, then the cash register will tell the tale. But if you were trying to increase general brand awareness, then you’re going to be measuring things like email sign-ups and traffic to your website.
4. Have fun with images.
A great way to get your Facebook Page noticed during the holidays is to do something fun with your cover image. For example, change it each day and make it like an advent calendar. Posts with images also get more attention so add a photo to your post! Don’t we all love seeing a photo of a delicious lunch special or gorgeous unique gift idea?
Another thing is to try a bit of humor. When people are in a good mood, they’re more likely to spend. So make your marketing messages entertaining, lighthearted and humorous.
5. Think like a person, not a marketer.
Regardless of what kind of business you’re in, the key is to realize that people are on Facebook for personal reasons. Nobody wakes up in the morning, looks at their phone and says, “Gee, I wonder what some big brand is doing today on Facebook.” They’re checking to see what’s happening in their friends’ lives. So when writing posts or creating ads, make sure you’re contributing positively to their day and their experience on Facebook.
6. Have a call to action!
Be sure to direct the viewer of your post with a call to action or “something to do”. It’s great to include a link back to your website where users can see your location, your hours, your menu, your schedule and much more to continue them down the road toward becoming a customer.
7. Find shoppers when they’re near you.
There’s a lot that businesses can do on Facebook to get more sales during the holidays. The easiest thing for brick-and-mortar businesses is to target audiences by using the Local Awareness feature. This allows you to target ads to people only when they’re physically near your business. You can even give people directions to your location right on their phones. Another way is to use Custom Audiences to find your best customers on Facebook, and then use Lookalike Audiences to find similar people.
Want to know more? Contact Hashtag Creative at 727-667-8188.
Below is a post I found on Facebook and without naming names, let me show you why this isn’t reaching the goal.
[vc_separator type=’transparent’ position=’center’ color=” thickness=’1′ up=” down=”]
Hashtags are used very differently on Instagram. You really can’t go wrong in using LOTS of them. Go crazy, it’s instagram and it’s fun. Some help, some do not at all, but they don’t hurt. #beer #craftbeer #omgIloveBeerSoMuch #SundayFundayWithAllMyFriends #ipasRuleForever [vc_separator type=’transparent’ position=’center’ color=” thickness=’3′ up=” down=”]
An Inbound Example:
I’m often asked to explain how inbound marketing works. Inbound Marketing is marketing that attracts people TO you. It’s content people love so they come to you to see, read, download. A good example is if I own a travel company that specializes in family vacations. Now i don’t want to scream from the mountain top, “hire me!”. Nor do I want to flood the airwaves, phone lines or mail boxes with information on “why you should hire me!” Rather, let’s take the “inbound” approach in 4 simple steps.
1. Blog. We will begin by bogging an article on our website. Your website is your home base and is where you want to drive all traffic. But we will not blog about our prices or our travel packages or why we’re the best to hire. No. We’ll write an article of interest to our ideal buyers. For example, “The top 3 places to vacation with your kids in Florida!”.
2. Promote this article. Now that we have our blog post written and a snazzy graphic to match, let’s use social media to let people know about it. We’ll do this on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ with the proper hashtags of course. Let our social followers know it’s on our site with an easy link to get there to read.
3. Now that our audience is on our website and reading this article (and we’ll use stats to track the activity!) we want to give them a “call to action”. aka Something To Do! Now we’re not selling just yet! Next we may offer something free if they just “sign up” to get it. Sign up meaning submitting their email address. This could be something like, “Get your free ‘must have packing list’ for traveling with kids!”
4. Thank you. We’ll thank them for downloading our free gift and invite them to look around our website.
5. We now have the email address of someone who we can assume has kids, has a desire to vacation with them, and is probably entering the shopping stage of their journey for planning such a trip. And that customer, is starting to view you as a friend and as an expert in your field. At this point, we can email this lead and continue the sales process. The “inbound” sales formula has a 100% higher rate of conversion of a lead to a sale over “outbound”. It’s easy to see why!
Yesterday’s television commercial is today’s Grindr App ad. We’ve come a long way baby indeed. Say hello to “inbound marketing”.
In the Mad Men, Bewitched inspired past, newspaper ads were king. TV was still quite new and a daily subscription to your local newspaper was a given in most households.
Then enter the power of the box. Must see TV and the flood of cable channels took us from the 3 big networks to a channel for every preference: cartoons, home improvement, movies. Did you tune in to watch the Super Bowl or the Super Bowl TV Commercials? Read More